The illustration of the door handle is a great example of piss-poor affordance. A slight ridge is not going to clearly communicate push vs. pull. Especially since our fingers, when gripping, actually like a ridge to fill in the open angle behind the first knuckles.
If you want someone to push, give them a big fat flat metal plate or bar to push on. If they can't pull, they are guaranteed to get it right every time. I bet pretty much every restaurant kitchen and high school gym door in the U.S. gets this right.
The door handle could actually be described as an anti-affordance. I looked at the photo and thought to myself what a great idea it was that it gave you a comfortable ridge for your knuckles while pulling and a nice rounded bit (instead of a sharp-edged flat surface) to push on.
That is, it signalled to me the exact opposite of the designer's intended use. I would have been doubly surprised if pulling on that clearly "pull-only" handle didn't open the door.
This is an important lesson. Programmers are constantly blaming users for this and that. Yes, it can make sense for stuff that's rare, but building your apps around the idea that users are rational human beings who read error messages and instructions makes no more sense than building your apps around the idea that computers have unlimited processing power and storage space.
99% of the time, "that was the user's fault" just doesn't cut it. You need to be design around the user's flaws just as you need to design around the computer's flaws, the network's flaws, the OS's flaws....
That's interesting news to me. I did wonder why smoking paraphernalia continued to appear in planes that were covered in anti-smoking insignia. I always assumed that the bathrooms, seat etc were made in large quantities, and that there are a lot of countries in the world where you can still light up in a flight, not to mention privately owned planes.
I once flew on a Japan Air Lines flight back in the '90s. At that stage they still had the back 6 rows or something as smoking seats. The girl who assigned my seat at check in didn't realise this and allocated me there. I just sat there and took it for 8 hours - nowadays I would have loudly demanded an upgrade out of there - but I was somewhat meek in accepting my fate. The lady next to me had just been to bury a relative in a car crash and was on the way back home. She must have drank half a bottle of whisky and smoked two packets of cigarettes. When I arrived I smelt like a tobacco spitoon and felt as though I had sand rubbed in my eyes.
Allowing smoking on planes was and is a terrible idea. The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.
"The fire risk alone should immediately discount it."
A quick Google turns up only two airline accidents possibly attributed to cigarettes (a 1982 Illyshin IL-18 crash in Guangzhou, China and a 1973 crash in France). Pretty minimal, given that smoking was allowed on millions of flights for close to 90 years.
The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.
In case you haven't noticed, the trash bins on airliners are designed to be air-tight so that a discarded cigarette that ignites a trash fire does not burn for long. There is essentially no fire risk, as a small fire will be immediately extinguished by one of the other 200 people on your plane with nothing else to do. Cigarettes are dangerous if you are smoking alone and fall asleep in bed. When 200 other people are within 50 feet of you, not so much.
This reminds me of a presentation by Twitter at a conference where they discussed MTBR (Mean Time Before Recovery) instead of MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure). Instead of trying to prevent all possible failures, they focused on acceptable failure and speedy recovery. If a server takes twice as long to response to a request, mark it offline and let the automated recovery process diagnose the problem and if it's just an anomaly mark it back online.
It was pretty interesting and we took a good look at our architecture and found ways to better cater to acceptable failures.
Audi's strategy in the early 2000s for winning Le Mans 12- and 24-hour endurance races against Bentley was to engineer their cars around failure. The Bentley cars were faster, but Audi engineered theirs to be easier to fix. Over such long races, there were bound to be crashes or failures of various parts and the faster Audi could fix their cars, the quicker they could get back out on the track to outlast the faster cars.
A great example of this was that Bentley used the lightest bolt they could everywhere on the car to minimize weight, but Audi used the same size bolt everywhere to minimize the number of tool changes needed to replace the parts.
This was always awesome to me. I knew it perfectly from the moment I saw the ashtrays that it was a conscious and genius decision for the human-centered system of an airplane.
This has business implications more than UI implications, I think. We don't question airlines when it comes to safety regulations, pilot time off, good amounts of rest, all that. We regulate everything liberally. Air travel is a system designed like clockwork for every single variable and every single complex input. And it works nearly flawlessly.
Yet, in business—even in the best businesses—we expect far more of individual people than they are capable of, instead of improving the systems they're in. You have to control for both, and design for the realities of business and work; even the human ones. Don't believe in myths, don't depend on rockstars, and prepare for anything. Improve your systems as if it was as important as air travel. Your employees are great, but put ashtrays in the bathrooms so they don't set the plane on fire. So to speak.
For those interested in systems thinking and especially how it relates to people and business, look up W. Edwards Deming and read at least his 14 points. Read "Out of the Crisis" for more. Personally I think systems thinking needs to be more prevalent in business today, but we're still a very individualist society so it's very difficult to make the leap. Something to consider as well.
I was thinking about this same idea earlier today: Buses in Philadelphia have a bunch of "No Eating and Drinking" signs and consequently no trash cans. The result is that the back of the bus is covered in trash. If they had just 1 or two trash cans it would be a much more pleasant ride.
Fire hazard maybe? Trash cans were removed from commuter trains in Stockholm since they were constantly being set on fire. They're on our buses though.
Go to England and you won't see trash cans in train stations at all.
Last time I was flying they had removed the bins from the waiting area (because terrorists). I almost wished I left the trash on the seats or not taken care to make it easy to remove -- that is the only way they will stop doing stupid shit like that.
The solution to that is to make the driver responsible for cleaning his bus, and also to give him the right to eject people that doesn't follow the rules.
Because, although it could bring down a plane, it's very likely not to. The fire will be detected quickly and then put out.
Your question is sort of like asking, if an airliner can fly on one engine, why do they bother putting on two? The answer, quite simply, is robustness.
Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988,
complaining about their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”.
This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge.
In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial
planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills.
Really? Does anyone actually think this was a bad idea? Forget the "filthy air" or "lung cancer", exposure to smoke can seriously aggravate asthmatics and other folks with respiratory conditions, not to mention cause respiratory conditions in children. Surely smokers can abstain for a few hours instead of exposing everyone in a confined space to their cigarette smoke. I'm at a loss as to why anyone would complain about this.
On the other hand, yeah, there are people who honestly think that those regulations are a bad idea that bring us farther down the Road to Serfdom and the ultimate death of Western Culture.
You can see the same principle in a lot of places. This makes me think of a passage I recently read about the legal system in Germany:
…Unlike many developing countries, German legal doctrine and practice avoid this
result. German regulatory violations seldom void contracts, and German
prosecutors seldom act on regulatory violations revealed in a civil trial. Thus a
gardener in the German gray market who does not pay taxes can sue an
employer for unpaid wages without fear of triggering regulatory prosecution.
And a customer who buys a restaurant meal at an hour when law requires the
closing of restaurants still has to pay his credit card bill. The same applies for a
construction contract that violates zoning regulations, or a credit contract that
violates banking regulations. Although seldom discussed in constitutional law,
separating the civil courts from the regulators and police is an important part of
the separation of powers, especially in countries with a large gray market.
I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to fly a lot over the past year or so. Working with Stephen Foskett and the rest of the Tech Field Day crew means that I’ve been to California almost every month. That’s a lot of flying.
One of the things that I’ve noticed on my flights is that they don’t want you to smoke. You actually used to be able to smoke on planes, which seems weird now that you can’t even smoke outide.
I’m not a smoker, so it doesn’t bother me. (As an adorable aside, when I was five years old, I literally glued hand-made no-smoking signs to the walls of my grandparents’ house. They were less than amused.) But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk.
Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining of their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. The FAA banned smoking on flights less than 2 hours, presumably because the pilots were getting nic-fits after longer than that.
This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills.
So now we’re flying without cigarettes, and they are not kidding around about this whole “no smoking” thing…all you have to do is open your eyes to see that they don’t want you smoking:
That light is never turned off. I have actually seen a few planes which were new enough that instead of a no-smoking sign say “Please turn off electronic devices”, under the assumption that everyone is already well-trained enough to not smoke, but those are comparatively rare. Nope, it’s mostly the “no smoking signs”. But in case you didn’t look up, here’s the safety information sheet on the airplane. See if you can count the number of “No Smoking” warnings:
And on top of this, there’s a smoke detector in the bathroom (along with a heavy fine for disabling the smoke detector, too!)
No, planes are pretty much set up for not-smoking. Heck, there’s even a “No Smoking” sign on the ashtray in the bathroom:
Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t.
When I first started bringing this up to people, I encountered the same reaction again and again. People would say, “oh, it just costs too much to replace the door or take out the ashtray”. This is absolutely not the reason, though.
Allow me to quote from the Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness:
Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don’t have ashtrays. They’re non-optional.
That’s an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent “no smoking” policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of.
The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt.
There’s a lot of wisdom in a decision like that. I think that it’s a lesson that we can put to use in a lot of the things that we do. There’s a really interesting book on a similar topic, called Nudge.. The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users.
This is similar to the design consideration called affordance. If you’ve ever walked up to a door and pushed, then realized that the door was supposed to be pulled, even though it looked like it should have been pushed, then you’ve come up against someone who didn’t understand affordance.
Here’s a good image of handles which afford pushing or pulling by Yanko Design:
It’s a cross between form and function. We have “grippy” hands that open flat. We instinctively know how to use things like this because of how we are formed.
You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy.
Likewise, when you are designing your infrastructure (or security policies), keep in mind the idea of affordance, and nudge people into making the “right” decision each time. The cynical Hanlon’s Razor says
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be ascribed to stupidity
Instead of stupidity, maybe people are trying to push on the door that’s supposed to be pulled.
The airlines actually save money by preventing smoking : The air in the cabins needs to be recycled less often. The flip side, though, is that air-bourne diseases are more prevalent on flights now, since the air is rebreathed more often before filtering. Source : Qi series 1 (BBC UK).
And enough time goes by without nobody ever seeing a cigarette being smoked midair, the fear of unknown grows (="that isn't normal, what could happen if someone lights a cigarette in an airplane, it could bring the whole plane down!") and then someone freaks out for seeing a pack of cigarettes in someone's pocket, and a few years after that the TSA will require cigarette packs to be removed at the security and kiosks in lounges to only sell cigarettes in sealed containers that must not be opened prior the flight.
And after that, if there's still someone who dares to smuggle these terrorist cancer sticks onto a plane and lights one, he will bring the whole plane down because some FAA rule from 2020 requires immediate landing in that case to the nearest strip to ensure the safety of passengers.
All that, despite the fact that there's still that ashtray in the toilet, non-optionally.
nice message with the real reason for the ashtrays.
one thing that bothered me however, was that push vs pull handle design. if you're really trying to provide affordance, why have a handle at all on a door that needs to be pushed? isnt it our natural tendency to pull on a door handle when provided with one?
all we'd need was a "Push" sign and we'd be done. The shape of the handle hinting how to use it seems subtler than providing the whole door surface as actionable; and if you had to unlock to open, we have well established pushable door designs already.
People frequently don't read signs, which is the point of the affordance design (plus caters to folks who can't read the given language). Also, hands make stuff dirty - you do want something there that's easy to clean, though that can just be a metal plate that can't be pulled.
I think the author gives the federal government too much credit. Which is more likely: the government out-witted people by thinking ahead and foreseeing people would break the law, so they write a law to counter it; or, they left the law on the books from when smoking was legal and never amended it? I think the latter.
The "federal government" as in the the FAA knows quite a bit about regulating airline safety. The probability that the FAA left a regulation in there because they just forgot to change it is pretty much 0.
I don't know about the Middle East. I've flown on just about all the Middle Eastern airlines over the past 7 years, I don't think I've seen a single one that permitted smoking.
Anecdotal evidence (the best kind!) - yes. A friend who went to the National Security Language Institute in Yemen last summer recalled several smoke-filled regional/commuter flights.
Not really surprised by smokers not being deterred by multiple warnings not to smoke on planes. Airlines rightly install ash trays to avoid smokers throwing cigarettes into the wrong place creating a real fire hazard.
Remember being on a long haul flight and passenger next to me would disappear to the lavatory clearly sneaking a smoke. He also snuck off to sleep in first class. We have rules in place for the minority of society who lack common sense.
Very good observation. I've never paid attention to the ashtray in the airplane bathrooms and thought they were relic from the plane design in the old days.
I thought they were a relic not of plane design, but from "flight certification" of the lavatories or the doors.
The FAA and the major US plane companies (of which only Boeing is left) made a huge process of flight certifying every little trinket and gewgaw. Once certified, the technology on a plane was essentially frozen, as it was too expensive to certify anything else. I give you the seatbelts and their pressed-steel 50s-style buckles as another example. They look like something Dr Benton Quest developed just after he graduated from college on the GI Bill.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|14 years ago|reply
If you want someone to push, give them a big fat flat metal plate or bar to push on. If they can't pull, they are guaranteed to get it right every time. I bet pretty much every restaurant kitchen and high school gym door in the U.S. gets this right.
[+] [-] jasonkester|14 years ago|reply
That is, it signalled to me the exact opposite of the designer's intended use. I would have been doubly surprised if pulling on that clearly "pull-only" handle didn't open the door.
[+] [-] duaneb|14 years ago|reply
PUSH: http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/...
PULL: http://www.artfactory.com/images/Door-Handle-HH199.jpg
The door handle sacrifices usability for aesthetics.
[+] [-] mikeash|14 years ago|reply
99% of the time, "that was the user's fault" just doesn't cut it. You need to be design around the user's flaws just as you need to design around the computer's flaws, the network's flaws, the OS's flaws....
[+] [-] brc|14 years ago|reply
I once flew on a Japan Air Lines flight back in the '90s. At that stage they still had the back 6 rows or something as smoking seats. The girl who assigned my seat at check in didn't realise this and allocated me there. I just sat there and took it for 8 hours - nowadays I would have loudly demanded an upgrade out of there - but I was somewhat meek in accepting my fate. The lady next to me had just been to bury a relative in a car crash and was on the way back home. She must have drank half a bottle of whisky and smoked two packets of cigarettes. When I arrived I smelt like a tobacco spitoon and felt as though I had sand rubbed in my eyes.
Allowing smoking on planes was and is a terrible idea. The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|14 years ago|reply
A quick Google turns up only two airline accidents possibly attributed to cigarettes (a 1982 Illyshin IL-18 crash in Guangzhou, China and a 1973 crash in France). Pretty minimal, given that smoking was allowed on millions of flights for close to 90 years.
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
In case you haven't noticed, the trash bins on airliners are designed to be air-tight so that a discarded cigarette that ignites a trash fire does not burn for long. There is essentially no fire risk, as a small fire will be immediately extinguished by one of the other 200 people on your plane with nothing else to do. Cigarettes are dangerous if you are smoking alone and fall asleep in bed. When 200 other people are within 50 feet of you, not so much.
A cancer risk, however, definitely yes.
[+] [-] lloeki|14 years ago|reply
Yet, people still smoke around pumps at gas stations and even throw the butt to the ground.
[+] [-] phamilton|14 years ago|reply
It was pretty interesting and we took a good look at our architecture and found ways to better cater to acceptable failures.
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
A great example of this was that Bentley used the lightest bolt they could everywhere on the car to minimize weight, but Audi used the same size bolt everywhere to minimize the number of tool changes needed to replace the parts.
[+] [-] WalterBright|14 years ago|reply
Both the Fukishima plant and the Deep Water Horizon rig were unable to withstand single failures.
[+] [-] calinet6|14 years ago|reply
This has business implications more than UI implications, I think. We don't question airlines when it comes to safety regulations, pilot time off, good amounts of rest, all that. We regulate everything liberally. Air travel is a system designed like clockwork for every single variable and every single complex input. And it works nearly flawlessly.
Yet, in business—even in the best businesses—we expect far more of individual people than they are capable of, instead of improving the systems they're in. You have to control for both, and design for the realities of business and work; even the human ones. Don't believe in myths, don't depend on rockstars, and prepare for anything. Improve your systems as if it was as important as air travel. Your employees are great, but put ashtrays in the bathrooms so they don't set the plane on fire. So to speak.
For those interested in systems thinking and especially how it relates to people and business, look up W. Edwards Deming and read at least his 14 points. Read "Out of the Crisis" for more. Personally I think systems thinking needs to be more prevalent in business today, but we're still a very individualist society so it's very difficult to make the leap. Something to consider as well.
[+] [-] nicholaides|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lflux|14 years ago|reply
Go to England and you won't see trash cans in train stations at all.
[+] [-] tomjen3|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yxhuvud|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asmithmd1|14 years ago|reply
I bet you could get a pretty roaring fire going using the 120v outlet and all the paper goods provided in the bathroom.
[+] [-] mikeash|14 years ago|reply
Your question is sort of like asking, if an airliner can fly on one engine, why do they bother putting on two? The answer, quite simply, is robustness.
[+] [-] stevenwei|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MPSimmons|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derleth|14 years ago|reply
On the other hand, yeah, there are people who honestly think that those regulations are a bad idea that bring us farther down the Road to Serfdom and the ultimate death of Western Culture.
[+] [-] Symmetry|14 years ago|reply
…Unlike many developing countries, German legal doctrine and practice avoid this result. German regulatory violations seldom void contracts, and German prosecutors seldom act on regulatory violations revealed in a civil trial. Thus a gardener in the German gray market who does not pay taxes can sue an employer for unpaid wages without fear of triggering regulatory prosecution. And a customer who buys a restaurant meal at an hour when law requires the closing of restaurants still has to pay his credit card bill. The same applies for a construction contract that violates zoning regulations, or a credit contract that violates banking regulations. Although seldom discussed in constitutional law, separating the civil courts from the regulators and police is an important part of the separation of powers, especially in countries with a large gray market.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/sol...
[+] [-] rprasad|14 years ago|reply
Contracts can be broken if they would require an illegal act (i.e., a "crime"), but regulatory infractions generally are not sufficient.
[+] [-] mjg59|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgermino|14 years ago|reply
Here's the text if it continues to not work:
I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to fly a lot over the past year or so. Working with Stephen Foskett and the rest of the Tech Field Day crew means that I’ve been to California almost every month. That’s a lot of flying.
One of the things that I’ve noticed on my flights is that they don’t want you to smoke. You actually used to be able to smoke on planes, which seems weird now that you can’t even smoke outide.
I’m not a smoker, so it doesn’t bother me. (As an adorable aside, when I was five years old, I literally glued hand-made no-smoking signs to the walls of my grandparents’ house. They were less than amused.) But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk.
Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining of their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. The FAA banned smoking on flights less than 2 hours, presumably because the pilots were getting nic-fits after longer than that.
This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills.
So now we’re flying without cigarettes, and they are not kidding around about this whole “no smoking” thing…all you have to do is open your eyes to see that they don’t want you smoking:
That light is never turned off. I have actually seen a few planes which were new enough that instead of a no-smoking sign say “Please turn off electronic devices”, under the assumption that everyone is already well-trained enough to not smoke, but those are comparatively rare. Nope, it’s mostly the “no smoking signs”. But in case you didn’t look up, here’s the safety information sheet on the airplane. See if you can count the number of “No Smoking” warnings:
And on top of this, there’s a smoke detector in the bathroom (along with a heavy fine for disabling the smoke detector, too!)
No, planes are pretty much set up for not-smoking. Heck, there’s even a “No Smoking” sign on the ashtray in the bathroom:
Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t.
When I first started bringing this up to people, I encountered the same reaction again and again. People would say, “oh, it just costs too much to replace the door or take out the ashtray”. This is absolutely not the reason, though.
Allow me to quote from the Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness:
Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don’t have ashtrays. They’re non-optional.
That’s an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent “no smoking” policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of.
The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt.
There’s a lot of wisdom in a decision like that. I think that it’s a lesson that we can put to use in a lot of the things that we do. There’s a really interesting book on a similar topic, called Nudge.. The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users.
This is similar to the design consideration called affordance. If you’ve ever walked up to a door and pushed, then realized that the door was supposed to be pulled, even though it looked like it should have been pushed, then you’ve come up against someone who didn’t understand affordance.
Here’s a good image of handles which afford pushing or pulling by Yanko Design:
It’s a cross between form and function. We have “grippy” hands that open flat. We instinctively know how to use things like this because of how we are formed.
You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy.
Likewise, when you are designing your infrastructure (or security policies), keep in mind the idea of affordance, and nudge people into making the “right” decision each time. The cynical Hanlon’s Razor says
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be ascribed to stupidity
Instead of stupidity, maybe people are trying to push on the door that’s supposed to be pulled.
[+] [-] kevinchen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdda|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|14 years ago|reply
And after that, if there's still someone who dares to smuggle these terrorist cancer sticks onto a plane and lights one, he will bring the whole plane down because some FAA rule from 2020 requires immediate landing in that case to the nearest strip to ensure the safety of passengers.
All that, despite the fact that there's still that ashtray in the toilet, non-optionally.
[+] [-] vinodkd|14 years ago|reply
one thing that bothered me however, was that push vs pull handle design. if you're really trying to provide affordance, why have a handle at all on a door that needs to be pushed? isnt it our natural tendency to pull on a door handle when provided with one?
all we'd need was a "Push" sign and we'd be done. The shape of the handle hinting how to use it seems subtler than providing the whole door surface as actionable; and if you had to unlock to open, we have well established pushable door designs already.
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaheard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojbyrne|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superuser2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sparknlaunch12|14 years ago|reply
Remember being on a long haul flight and passenger next to me would disappear to the lavatory clearly sneaking a smoke. He also snuck off to sleep in first class. We have rules in place for the minority of society who lack common sense.
[+] [-] ww520|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bediger4000|14 years ago|reply
The FAA and the major US plane companies (of which only Boeing is left) made a huge process of flight certifying every little trinket and gewgaw. Once certified, the technology on a plane was essentially frozen, as it was too expensive to certify anything else. I give you the seatbelts and their pressed-steel 50s-style buckles as another example. They look like something Dr Benton Quest developed just after he graduated from college on the GI Bill.
[+] [-] dantiberian|14 years ago|reply
http://nudges.org/ http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happi...
[+] [-] thereason|14 years ago|reply
The fact that some on HN cannot detect the sense of humor is a little scary.